Slow Horses Quotes
"Because here was a world I knew about. The life of spies, whether the James Bond copycats with their jetpacks and exploding wristwatches, or the down-at-heel dogsbodies of Len Deighton and John le Carré, were foreign territory to me, but I knew what went on behind ordinary doors; I knew about office life, about office politics."
"A writer spends the first part of his or her career hoping to be discovered; the rest hoping not to be found out."
"The Borough of Finsbury hasn’t existed since 1963, when it was absorbed into the City of London."
"Inevitably, I was starting to steer my fictional impulses towards the world of espionage."
"The life that I had known was visibly dwindling."
"To look, for example, at a black door sandwiched between two retail premises, and wonder what goes on behind it."
"Bad spies, I decided, could go to Slough House."
"If every organisation has its failures—its second-raters—wouldn’t that be well inside my comfort zone?"
"Being here means I have to sit watching this like everybody else. That's not what I joined the Service for."
"We get on with our jobs. What did you think we did?"
"If you knew it was only for six months, it wouldn't hurt."
"Doesn't matter if it's not real. It's the idea you have to defend."
"You're your mother's son, that's all."
"He’s a man of habit. He has coffee at the same café every morning."
"The laptop’s the one you delivered to Regent’s Park."
"There were ways of telling when someone was lying."
"Eternal strings of figures mapping one endless circle."
"Abandoning his sandwich, he headed back to Slough House."
"His face was plain to see, and it wasn’t a face they’d been expecting."
"He looked soft and dreamy. And scared stiff."
"Trust me, he’s Pakistani, because that’s the average numpty’s shorthand for Muslim."
"If I wanted maximum attention. I’d start off letting everybody think they knew what was happening."
"The boy’s face was still soft and glossy, but his eyes were shafts into the dark."
"I walked home. A lot of Londoners did that on the seventh of July."
"I’m having difficulty imagining Ho doing you a favour."
"We both know you know nothing, Cartwright. But that doesn’t mean Regent’s Park won’t be looking for you."
"Entering, they were met with the sound of newly established silence."
"The air trembled like a fork in the darkness."
"Breaking his neck without going through your line manager, that shit stays on your record."
"Her blood was on his shirt still. Possibly in his hair."
"Our failures get more press than our successes."
"We’re going to cut your head off and show it on the web."
"Think of it as bringing communities together."
"She was neither cuffed nor roughly handled. The man was guiding her by the elbow, but it could have been taken as support if you didn’t know what you were watching."
"The moments during which River could have done anything to stop any of this had been over before he got here."
"Not since that email suggesting that your boss and mine, Ingrid Tearney, was an Al Qaeda plant."
"It was the outfit she wore on Question Time, you know, that desert-gown thing."
"Of course, that doesn’t mean it never will. Nothing’s impossible."
"Leave it for now. You could coast for a while on that mantra."
"He hadn’t liked Jed Moody, but didn’t enjoy knowing he’d been the instrument of his death."
"Because once in a nun’s nightmare, one of them would turn out to be Jackson Lamb."
"Remember Sam Chapman? Bad Sam once said he wasn’t frightened of anyone except overweight guys with bad breath and ill-fitting shirts."
"Usually by this time, just after six thirty, all sharp edges would have been smoothed away."
"In every operation came a lull. When it did, you shut your eyes and took inventory."
"Living life, instead of easing through it on the wet stuff."
"The world had moved on, and what would his message be anyway?"
"The Service, like everyone else, was hamstrung by rules and regulations."
"Dickie was a relic. The world had moved on, and it had left him behind."
"Scrolling through his contact list, he was struck by how short it was."
"The landscape continued unrolling one black fold after another, dotted with pinpricks of light, like sequins on a scarf."
"A fox was spotted one mid-morning, padding from White Lion Court into the Barbican Centre."
"Cats are either adjuncts or substitutes, and Catherine Standish has no truck with either."
"Jackson Lamb sighed, and reached for his cigarettes."
"Slough House/slow horse. A wordplay based on a joke whose origins were almost forgotten."